The Things I’ll Ban when I Get Elected Mayor of New York City

Unless he changes the rules again, Mike Bloomberg will stop being mayor of New York City at the end of this year. Since everyone else in the city is running for mayor, I figure I might as well get in on the fun. My qualifications? I have never posted pictures of my erect penis on Twitter, and I did not make a billion dollars overcharging people for groceries, as two of my rival candidates can claim. But I have spent most of my adult life getting priced out of one up-and-coming New York neighborhood after another, and I have survived two blackouts, a minor earthquake, a major hurricane, a terrorist attack, and a Republican national convention.

When elected, I vow to ban seven things. No exceptions, no whining, no ACLU lawsuits. They are:

1. Book Store Closings
Every year the staff at my favorite bookstore, St. Mark’s Bookshop, has to pass the hat because the store can’t afford the grand-larceny rent. Other bookstores, from huge chain outfits like Borders to small independents, keep going out of business. Under my administration, no bookstore will be allowed to close. Stores suffering financial difficulties will be eligible for no-strings grants that enable them to stay in business, hire more staff, and stock more titles. How will I pay for the grants? By levying a modest 0.001% income surtax on the city’s billionaires (sorry, Mike, but you can afford it!) and aggressively collecting unpaid back taxes from Bank of America and other corporate cheats.

2. Tourists
More than 52 million out-of-towners invaded New York City last year, an all-time record. From what I overheard on the street, the majority of these invaders were from France, Germany, and Ohio. This must stop. Under my administration, non-New Yorkers will be granted visas to enter New York City for a maximum of 48 hours if — and only if — they can prove they are business travelers here to make money and therefore will be too busy to mosey around Times Square, the High Line, the Chelsea Market, SoHo, Century 21, and the Staten Island Ferry, taking pictures, hogging scarce space, moving too slowly (or not moving at all), and holding endless debates on whether they should eat dinner at Applebee’s now or take in The Lion King first and eat dinner at Applebee’s after the show.

Don’t worry about lost revenue. Giddy New Yorkers will stop barricading themselves in their apartments at night and will begin flooding the tourist-free streets, spending money like drunken sailors in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and on tickets to The Lion King.

3. Dogs
I realize this is a hot-button issue, but banning dogs from the city is actually a pro-dog, not an anti-dog, move. I love dogs! Put yourself in a dog’s paws. Would you want to be a part of the braying, the stench and the fawning — “Look at that adorable Corgi trying to hump that Great Dane!” — at one of the city’s dog runs on a hot August afternoon? No! Have you ever been lashed to a pay phone and spent a couple of hours yapping at the sky while your master hangs out in the corner deli talking about what’s wrong with the Mets? No! If you’re a dog, you understand that you don’t belong in an over-crowded city made mainly of concrete, motor vehicles, and pushy human beings; you belong in the great outdoors full of grass and trees, where there are no pooper-scooper laws and you can run, copulate, and defecate freely. I realize this is going to be a tough sell with the doggie crowd, but if you really love your dogs so much, you’ll free them from your cramped apartments and those stinky dog runs and you’ll set them loose in the vast open spaces of France, Germany, and Ohio.

4. Tattoos
Another toughie, especially for prison inmates, hipsters, and J.R. Smith of the Knicks, but this one has a huge upside. When I close down all the city’s tattoo parlors, not one single tattoo “artist” will lose a job — because they’ll get new jobs removing tattoos. I’ll establish a free city-wide network of laser tattoo-removal studios that will employ all of the former tattoo “artists” plus all the MFAs who need to supplement the income from their day jobs pretending to do important things on computers at the front desks of Chelsea art galleries. Mandatory tattoo-removal will be a money-maker with an aesthetic bonus: no more otherwise-attractive young women with antlers inked onto their lower backs. (Full disclosure: My brother owns the patent to the InkBeGone laser tattoo-removal technology, and he’ll probably make some money when the city awards its multi-million-dollar contracts for laser-removal parlors.)

5. Car Alarms
This one, I’ll admit, is a no-brainer. Everyone hates car alarms. Even insurance companies hate car alarms because car alarm owners pay lower insurance premiums than schmucks like me who drive cars that were made before the invention of the car alarm. This sad state of affairs inspired the insurance industry to commission an independent study that revealed the shocking news that car alarms do absolutely nothing to deter auto theft. The only people who don’t hate car alarms are the people who make, sell, and install car alarms.

So close your eyes the next time a blatting motorcyle, a shrieking ambulance, or a loud car radio moves down your block. Instead of the symphonic zoop!zoop!zoop! grrrt!grrt!grrrt! hoo-weeeee! hoo-weeeee! hoo-weeeee! REE-a-REE-a-REE-a-REE-a of a dozen car alarms going off at once, try to imagine…nothing…just a warm bath of silence. Some people believe it’s impossible to rid the city of car alarms because of the powerful car-alarm lobby. But, remember, people said the same thing about squeegee men, subway graffiti, peepshows, and affordable apartments. And all those things went poof!.

6. Mandatory Smoking Bans
The last straw was when Mike made it illegal for me to smoke my fat, noxious Dominican cigars in East River Park while enjoying the refreshing river stench and those terrific views of fuel storage tanks and shiny high-rise condos on the Brooklyn waterfront. So I’m going to turn back the clock and make smoking bans voluntary. Owners of all bars, restaurants, theaters, and office and apartment buildings will be free to choose if they want to allow smoking on their premises, or ban it. Then they’ll be required to put up a sign in front of the building that says either DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT SMOKING INSIDE or COME ON IN AND KILL YOURSELF, WE’RE ALL DOING IT. Smokers seeing the former sign will keep on walking; non-smokers seeing the latter sign will do likewise. Everybody’s happy. Nobody gets told what to do. Same goes for public parks, which will have designated smoking areas on the sites of all the de-commissioned, de-odorized dog runs. I promise you, our parks will actually smell better.

7. Bullets
As the great philosopher Chris Rock has noted, AR-15 semiautomatic rifles don’t kill people. Bullets kill people. So I’m banning all bullets, from BB’s right on up through dum-dums and hollow points. This niftily avoids an un-winnable confrontation with the all-powerful National Rifle Association, which has concluded that the best way to stop school shootings is to get more guns into schools, preferably in the hands of expert marskmen employed as janitors and teachers’ aides. Since there is no National Bullet Association, to my knowledge, I say let New Yorkers own as many guns as they like — but don’t let them have any bullets. My ban will apply to everyone, including the police, Second Amendment wackos, and the gang bangers who live in the projects across Avenue D from my apartment. This is democracy at its purest because all New Yorkers, regardless of race, religion, national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, income, or zip code, will finally have something in common: absolutely no one will get shot anymore.

In closing, I also promise to ban penis pictures on Twitter, street fairs, $25 museum tickets, overpriced groceries, Brooklyn, 3-D movies, ambulatory texting, February, artisanal cheese and pickles, Spike Lee, stretch limos, ice cream trucks, franchise restaurants, and The Lion King. But, as I learned from my predecessor’s misguided attempt to limit the size of soft drinks, it’s not smart to be overly ambitious. So I’ll save those bans for my second and third terms. Or maybe, after I change the law on term limits, my fourth and fifth terms.

Bill Morris
is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of the novels Motor City Burning, All Souls’ Day, and Motor City, and the nonfiction book American Berserk. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times, The (London) Independent, L.A. Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

My wife carries the distinction of being, among many other things, the world’s most ardent fan of the southern California folk-rock band Dawes. If they’re playing a show within 100 miles of our home, she will unquestionably be there; when they announce the release of a new recording, she pre-orders it as soon as she can. And if they offer a book club -- in which, every other month, a member of Dawes sends out a paperback, along with an explanation of why he chose that book -- she will become a member, excessive cost be damned. Since she joined in August, we’ve received three Dawes-approved titles: Italo Calvino’sIf on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Ken Kesey’sSometimes a Great Notion, and, most recently, Henry Miller’sBig Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. “[Miller] leans heavily on some of the pre-existing tenets of eastern religion,” drummer Griffin Goldsmith writes in his “Dawes Book Report,” “particularly the idea that an individual’s happiness is not only contingent upon where they are in the world, but also upon a confluence of internal emotions.”
To put it mildly, such knottiness is not what my wife expected from her fluffy-haired purveyors of golden-hued singalongs. (And I can’t really blame her; in college, I abandoned Sometimes a Great Notion after 15 flummoxing, headache-inducing pages.) All I can do is clear out shelf space for her new and difficult books -- and suggest, politely, that she join one of the following competing rock 'n' roll reading clubs, which, of course, include their own book reports.
Ozzy Osbourne: Of Mice and MenSo, Of Mice and Men, it’s got this big dumb wanker, Christ, I can’t remember his name -- wait, wait, it’s Denny, no, Lenny, that’s it -- and his mate, this teensy little shitter, George. This George fellow is like the Oates to Lenny’s Hall, if that makes any sense. I don’t think it does. Fucking “Maneater,” innit. Anyway, they’re all kinda walking around and what, like, camping? And the big one, he’s always killing the animals ‘cos he’s sofucking big. Like, you ever see that guy, whatsit, Joey Ramone? I met him once in Boston, or like Tokyo? He was fuckin’ huge, and that’s who I kept thinking of when I was reading this book. At the end of the book, the guy from the Ramones kills this kind of hooker-type bird in a barn, and that was pretty much that. Christ, I don’t know what this book was on about.
Bob Dylan: TwilightTwilight is a book about a girl who falls in love with a boy who, I’ll tell you right now, just happens to be a vampire. Life is funny like that sometimes. But this girl, her name is Bella. And she can’t do anything about this love of hers; she just can’t put it through. Some hoodoo about magic powers, is what I’m gathering. Young love is like that, I’ve found -- untrustworthy at its heart and cold where it shouldn’t be. The book asks a certain kind of question, one that the wise men have been wrestling since the days of Plato, since the days of Little Richard, banging out his mystic sounds: is true love possible? And if not, how about vampire love? Now, I don’t know if it is or not, since I never was able to finish the book. I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it, to be honest on all fronts. It’s really long -- longer than the mighty Mississippi, where you can hear that steam whistle blow, far off into the night. Out beyond them sycamore trees standing out in the dark. A sound to scare the vampires, if there are any vampires around to scare.
Jimmy Buffett: American PsychoMaybe you weren’t expecting Bret Easton Ellis’sAmerican Psycho to be the first selection of my book club. Jimmy, I hear you plead, you’re the bard of the beachfront, the Wordsworth of the waves. You once released an album called License to Chill; you write songs about delicious cheeseburgers. Why kick things off with a harrowing, full-bore descent into the savage, blood-spattered heart of our long-dead modern dream? Why confront us with this jagged, debauched journey into a pornographic, torturous vision? Why not give us something easy, something by Carl Hiaasen or, you know, Dave Barry -- or better yet, one of your own books, like the lounge-chair-ready A Salty Piece of Land or Where is Joe Merchant?
My response is this, my faithful Parrotheads: beneath every placid exterior lies a festering, maggot-ridden core, a hellish pit of snakes and raw-boned, scalding pain. Stare into those waves lapping gently against the shore long enough, and soon enough you’ll see the nihilism in their relentless pounding; that water at your sunburned feet should remind us all of the steady encroachment of death.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes -- I hope you dig the book! Up next after this one: The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly!
Adam Levine: Ulysses
Hey, Maroon 5 Book Clubbers! This month’s super-cool novel is James Joyce’sUlysses, which is hugely important to me, and not just because it’s the most prominent landmark in modernist literature -- or that in 1998 the Modern Library named it the best English-language novel of the 20th Century! I chose Ulysses because it’s a work in which life’s complexities are depicted with unprecedented, and unequalled, linguistic and stylistic virtuosity. (Seriously, guys, it is!) But that’s not all: in its characters we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence! Isn’t that rad? All right now, Fivers, get to it -- I hope you love it as much as I did! ‘Cause I totally read it -- and other books, too! I didn’t just have my assistant cut and paste lines from Wikipedia to make it seem like I had read Joyce’s sublime masterpiece, which, I have to say, depicts life's complexities with unprecedented, and unequalled, linguistic and stylistic virtuosity!
Image Credit: Wikipedia/jon rubin.

Singer. Newly rich individual. Reality TV person. Naked blogger. Politician sexting victim. Politician. Tech mogul. Koch-brother style of oligarch. It is imperative, before you sit down to write, that none of these alternatives are available to you in either the short or medium term.

Bill, listening to you talk about urban dogs is like listening to Mitt Romney talk about how it’s dangerous that you can’t roll down airplane windows. I know everybody’s entitled to have an opinion, but man, sometimes voicing it—even “comically,” since this piece has the appearance of aspring to humor—just reveals ignorance. And not innocent ignorance, but rather that Romneyesque arrogance of ignorance, in which you plow ahead in the belief that your own moral superiority is surely worth the same weight as the legions of experts and experienced people who have a far better understanding of the issue. The dogs will do just fine without your yapping on their behalf.

Each man’s middle age crisis begins at an indeterminate age and offers a peculiar window into the architecture of masculine decline. In this respect it mimics death, which is both punctual and ruthlessly efficient in its demolitions. For many men, the crisis begins with the fear that your Emersonian Self-Reliance is spent, or even worse, you’ve sucked so deeply on the marrow of life that you are now as penniless as Henry David Thoreau.
In my case, the crisis has arrived at the age of 39 with the realization that I’m numerically closer to 48 than I am to 29. Now this isn’t to suggest my twenties were a time of wine and roses, but simply to make the point that 48 is old—crotchety old in my book, as in Mr. Roper the curmudgeonly landlord in Three’s Company or the portly short-order cook Mel Sharples from Alice (I’m painfully aware that younger readers may find these 1970s references both dated and horridly nostalgic). And the reason that 48 is old, of course, is that it is two steps from 50, which is not the new 20 or the new 30, but the old half-century mark, period.
I proudly note that my crisis has not involved acting out cultural stereotypes — there have been no impulsive trips to the Corvette dealership or expensive gym memberships — but centers instead on Wikipedia entries and male celebrities over the age of 40. It plays out like this: night after night I Google celebrities as they flash across my television screen, not only looking up their age, but trying to get a handle on what they’ve accomplished by 40 — and even more importantly — what great achievements are possible in the 5th, 6th, and even 7th decades of one’s life.
I quickly realized Wikipedia was indispensable for such queries, for its entries list a person’s date of birth up front, along with paragraphs on the celebrity’s early life, professional career, and personal life. Armed with accurate chronologically-based facts, I learned how little I’d accomplished by 39 in relation to say, Charlie Sheen, who though he is clearly in a class by himself when it comes to the middle age crisis, did have impressive films like Platoon and Wall Street on his resume years before tiger blood and Twitter.
Over time my Wikipedia research has uncovered the dark underbelly of my own crisis, which isn’t that I fear death to be imminent, but that I regret the years I squandered in my twenties and thirties loitering through time and space. As a result, my non-existent Wikipedia listing has nothing about the spellbinding novel I’ve written, the legendary appearances on the Charlie Rose Show, the critically-acclaimed performance in Sofia Coppola’s recent dreamy bio-epic on Morrissey or my special friendship with writer Christopher Hitchens.
Speaking of Charlie Rose, I know from Wikipedia that he was born in 1942, which if you do the math makes him 69. From my crisis point of 39, I can comfort myself by thinking, “Okay, after the age of 40, Charlie lived 29 more years where he did some of his best work.” I scan down to the "Career" section of his biography where I find the real gem in his entry: he didn’t begin the Charlie Rose Show until 1991 at the mature age of 49. This means I still have 10 more years to finish the novel and/or bump into Sofia Coppola on the streets of Paris.
Watching the news over the last two months I’ve become curious about former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK). It turns out that DSK is 62 years old, seven years younger than Charlie Rose, but arguably less attractive, although we’d need a woman between the age of 35 and 50 to confirm this. And although he’s shaped like a beet and not particularly handsome, it was a revelation to learn that he was an infamous ladies' man in France. I began to wonder: will I still be attractive to women when I’m in my 60s? Being happily married I will never find out of course, but men — like their female counterparts — like to think they remain at least plausible to the opposite sex.
During a typical night of TV I come across CNN’s Piers Morgan, he’s probably about 50, but I’m not that interested in Mr. Morgan so I don’t Google him. I flip from channel 702 all the way up to 790 and then to the chagrin of my lovely wife — who is not in the least alarmed I will soon be 40 — I descend back to 702, pausing briefly on ESPN to marvel at men who are forever in their prime. This pause gives rise to guilt that I’m not reading volume two of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy by the fabulous Spanish novelist Javier Marias, who was born in Madrid in 1955 and is now 56. I learned too late that Marias is precisely the kind of person you do not want to look up on Wikipedia, because he published his first novel when he was 20, speaks English flawlessly, and because he’s European, does not have the kind of American habits that give rise to middle-aged bellies the size of the Iberian Peninsula.
The crisis goes on like this night and day. It matters little whether I’m on YouTube, watching television, flipping through my wife’s magazines or churning through RSS feeds and Twitter updates, there are always endless amounts of famous, middle-age men to look up. There is the former Connection radio host Christopher Lydon (70), my favorite literary critic Harold Bloom (80 — which means I could double my life, if I shared his longevity), former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer (51), British rocker Morrissey (52), and on and on it goes.
In addition to my Wikipedia obsession, it has also been impossible to ignore that something new, and very French, is happening to me: I’ve been reading and talking far too much about Paris lately, which is significant because I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a Francophile. A sudden interest in Adam Gopnik’s (55) book Paris To the Moon, a yearning to watch Juliette Binoche (47) movies on Netflix, and the serendipitous connections involving Frenchman DSK, Sofia Coppola (39) who lives in France, Charlie Rose who is a well-known Francophile, and Christopher Hitchens (62), who used to be a Marxist (Okay, I admit that one is a stretch).
Having read the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, I was immediately concerned that like the character April Wheeler, I was fantasizing about a magical life in Paris as a form of escapism. It worried me that it was possible to quit my job, sell the condo, move to Paris (I’ve seen it done on HGTV’s House Hunters International after all) and start working on a novel while my wife spent her days buying fresh-cut flowers and baguettes. But before I could become too anxious about what it all meant, a factoid from the book hit me. The characters Frank and April Wheeler weren’t going through a middle age crisis — they were no more than 30 in the book — but a metaphysical crisis, which I wrapped up way back when I was 35! No need to worry.
Relieved that the Wheelers’ crisis wasn’t my own, I started thinking that living in Paris for a few years might not be the mark of crisis at all, but an opportunity. That’s what Gopnik did, not to mention the novelist Paul Auster (64) who lived in Paris in the early 1970s. They did not move to France permanently, for that would be rather clichéd, and let’s face it, slightly pathetic. I’m talking about a few years, five tops.
I can picture it now: my wife and I are lounging at a café in the 6th district. I’m scribbling away in a notebook as my wife raves about how fresh the arugula is. All of a sudden, we look up and see the lithe figure of Sofia Coppola and her husband, Phoenix front man Thomas Mars (34), standing directly in front of our table. “Are you an American by any chance?” she says. “Why yes. I sure am,” I respond.
We invite them to sit down and Sofia explains how her next film is about an American in Paris. She describes the project as a “kind of Henry James meets Quentin Tarantino (48) type of thriller” — and I’m instantly intrigued. Within minutes Sofia presses a script into my hands and declares I’m perfect for the role. We decide to move the feast to Sofia’s penthouse where everyone kicks back, while I rework her script on the fly. I hand the manuscript back to Sofia with red slashes and scribbled words. She pauses to scan my edits and is dumbstruck at my narrative instincts and ear for dialogue.
“You’re a writer too?” Sofia says.
“Yeah, I’ve written a few things,” I say modestly.
“How is it that we’ve never heard of you before,” Sofia says. “With all this talent?”
I shrug my shoulders and wink at my wife.
“You must be one of those, how do you say in English, late bloomers?” Thomas asks.
“That’s it,” I say, downing a glass of wine. “I’m a late bloomer.”
Image credit: Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray (60) on set via orangeintense/Flickr

Arnold Goodman (Center, dancing): What a night! It was my daughter Meredith’s wedding, and I was in the mood to celebrate. Nobody ever thought she’d marry -- she had that thing on her lip, for one thing -- so to get her married was a very big deal. And Thad was a decent enough guy.
Sylvia Goodman (Pink dress, left): We paid through the nose for that reception; through the nose. It was at that catering hall. The one that used to be on Route 12? I think it’s a car wash now.
Arnold Goodman: I was talking to one of my friends at the office -- I was still with the firm then, late-'79 -- and he was asking how we were fixed for dancers. I said, “Dancers?”
Richard Gold (Back to the camera, brown suit, far right): I couldn’t believe Arnie hadn’t thought of hiring dancers. I said, “You’re going to have a disc jockey, right? Well, you’re gonna need some dancers.” The thing was, I already had some dancers in mind.
Gina Thomas (Dancer, right): I’d been with the Space Cadettes for a few months at that point, and when we got the Goodman Wedding, I didn’t think much of it. Just another gig, you know?
Bette Wenger (Dancer, center): That night would change our lives.
Danny Lampton (Mustache and glasses, right): The thing I’ll always remember was how boring the actual ceremony was. I mean -- and I don’t mean any offense -- I don’t think anyone really wanted to be there. It was like going to the dentist’s. And then we walked into the reception room, and it’s all brown in there, you know -- it was the '70s; everything was brown.
Gina Thomas: We were all set up; the ceremony was in the room next door. And when the people started coming in, they all looked like they’d been through like a seminar or something. Just no emotion at all.
Sylvia Goodman: Meredith and Thad aren’t the most dynamic types.
Meredith Goodman (Bride, not pictured): We went to Scranton on our honeymoon. We’d heard there was a diner there that had really good French onion soup.
Peter Taylor (DJ, not pictured): Everyone came in, got a drink, mingled around. And I started with “Love You Inside Out,” the Bee Gees song. It was a big hit at the time. And that really kicked things off.
Arnold Goodman: I’m no dancer, so I went to the bar, had a Scotch and soda. But during the second or third song, something just came over me. And it wasn’t the Scotch. That had nothing to do with it.
Peter Taylor: The second song was “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” by Rod Stewart. And I remember the dad just got this look in his eye and started jerking around. For a second, I thought he was having a stroke.
Sylvia Goodman: All the planning, all the worrying about Meredith maybe being an old maid…It all just came out on that dance floor [for Arnold]. He didn’t even like Rod Stewart -- he thought he was too “rock and roll” -- but that song came on, and it was off to the races.
Danny Lampton: When he saw those space chicks out there, his eyes just lit up.
Richard Gold: I saw him looking at the Cadettes, and I was like, “Told you so, Arnie!”
Meredith Goodman: I’ve never seen Dad like that, never. It was amazing, but it was also a little scary.
Arnold Goodman: I didn’t even take my jacket off. I couldn’t get my hands to work the buttons, I was so worked up. I started to dance, and I just couldn’t stop.
Peter Taylor: Blondie, Gloria Gaynor, Peaches & Herb…the guy was a maniac. You ever see Michael Jackson at the Soul Train awards? The first time he moonwalked? Legendary, right? The intensity, the moves? Well, I shit you not: Arnold Goodman was right there with him that night.
Richard Gold: That was the first time I ever saw breakdancing. That's right: Arnie was fuckin' breakdancing. Spinning around on his back like a turtle, hopping all over. A few years later, I saw a commercial for Breakin’ and I was like, “Holy shit! That’s what Arnie was doing!”
Bette Wenger: Here’s this mild-mannered guy -- at least he looked mild-mannered -- who’s just tearing it up out there, like nothing I’d ever seen. I was a professional dancer, and I couldn’t keep up.
Gina Thomas: I thought he was the sexiest thing I ever saw.
Arnold Goodman: Having those girls there in their little silver suits, that certainly didn’t hurt.
Sylvia Goodman: I remember at one point, those dancers were watching him…and it was like they were looking at Paul Newman or George Hamilton or someone… almost with lust in their eyes.
Gina Thomas: The way he was going, it was almost like…he was showing us what was possible. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and honestly, I think it might’ve been like…being in the crowd when the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane. It was just so unexpected. Like you’re taking out the garbage, and there’s a unicorn in your backyard.
Sylvia Goodman: I tried to go out and dance with him at one point, but it was no use. I said, “Arnie, you’re going to hurt yourself.” They had to cancel the father-daughter dance because he couldn’t slow down. It’s a shame, too, because they were going to use this Johnny Mathis song that I just loved.Peter Taylor: He was so possessed that at one point, I put on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” -- the Streisand/Neil Diamond tune -- just to calm him down. But he just kept going, going, going — like if I’d put on “Le Freak” or something.
Danny Lampton: Three words for Arnie that night: Raw. Animal. Sexuality.
Arnold Goodman: The funny thing is, I was in such a state, I don’t remember anything about it. Cocktail hour, dinner, my speech: it’s all a blur. I might not have even made a speech; who knows.
Meredith Goodman: We had to cancel his speech. Honestly, I didn’t think it was so great, having him dancing like that. It was like having an escaped mental patient crash your wedding.
Arnold Goodman: What I do remember about that night is the hotel room afterwards. Let’s just say that Sylvia was the “beneficiary” of my mood.
Sylvia Goodman: I think he might’ve been thinking about those dancers -- especially the one with the curly hair? But it was nice. It was like we were teenagers again.
Gina Thomas: It’s been 35 years -- more than that -- and I still think about him. I wonder if he thinks of me.
Arnold Goodman: Like I said, that night was a total blur. Luckily, I have the pictures. Or at least most of them. There’s one in particular that seems to have gone missing. For the life of me, I can’t imagine where it got off to. But it’s okay. I’m sure it’ll turn up.

Writing is hard. Everybody knows that. And one of the hardest things to write -- and write well -- are similes. So, as a public service, I’m supplying the general public with the following fair-use similes. That’s right: these are 100 percent free to use. Sprinkle them throughout your own writing -- your emails, your letters, your ham-fisted dystopian romance novels -- and be amazed by the lift in the overall quality of your work. You can thank me later.
1. The sun descended toward the horizon like a fried egg sliding off a fat man's naked thigh.
2. Her smile was as wide as the Mississippi River, with none of the intractable benzene pollution.
3.They made love as frantically as a weasel trying to escape from a linen closet.
4. The child, in knee socks and culottes, was as carefree as Ed Gein before he exhumed all those corpses to make pajamas from their skin.
5. He felt as hopeless as a fishmonger at a Missouri nudist colony.
6. His love for her was as true as a correct answer on a true/false test about truth.
7. His penis stood at attention like a nervous soldier on his first day of basic training. The penis even wore a tiny camouflage helmet and, somehow, combat boots.
8. "How dare you?" he exploded, like a rotten cassava melon thrown at a passing tram.
9. The dog tilted its head quizzically, as addled as a sleepy toddler in a Yale robotics colloquium.
10. His voice cracked like an egg that would then be fried and inexplicably placed on a fat man's naked thigh.
11. The room grew as dim as the dark side of the moon, which is also the title of Pink Floyd's best album, and if you're going to say Wish You Were Here is better, man, go back and listen to Dark Side. I mean, do yourself a favor and really listen to it.
12. The moment was as disappointing as arriving at the Sizzler hot bar with an empty plate, only to find that the whole damn place is plumb out of corn fritters.
13. His shoes squeaked on the tile, as distracting as a dreadlocked busker playing ska-inflected Dave Matthews covers at your great-aunt’s funeral.
14. Sadness ripped through him like that weird chest pain you always get after one too many gluten-free toaster waffles.
15. He stood tall as he glided confidently across the crowded room, like Manute Bol on rollerblades.
16. It was eerily quiet in the forest clearing, as if God himself had been all, like, "Dude, shut up, I think my parents are coming!"
17. The emotion that filled his heart was as pure as water poured from a PUR 7-Cup Water Pitcher. (This simile brought to you by PUR.)
18. Shaken, she felt as fragile as an egg that would then be cracked, fried, and inexplicably placed on a fat man's naked thigh.
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